Head Case

by Ross Armstrong

  So, I’m attempting to pretend to be concentrating on various things. Our notes. Thinking through our work plan for today. When, in fact, we’re both listening. Pretending to take no notice in an update Anderson and Stevens are giving about Tanya Fraser.

  They say they checked her home and there’s nothing to suggest any foul play there. Which I suppose there wasn’t if you weren’t looking effectively.

  They say that they’re ‘not ruling anything out’ but are ‘interested in her truancy record’.

  They say they know she’s gone missing overnight before, and it turned out that she and a school friend were staying with her cousin in Essex, where they roamed around parks and shopping centres, smoking.

  Having taken advice from the missing persons bureau, who use data compiled from 3,000 previous cases, they leaned heavily on the belief that she would, in all probability, come back of her own accord.

  You see, two hundred and twenty thousand children go missing in Britain every year. Thirty percent of fifteen to seventeen-year-olds come home without police intervention. Eighty percent of missing teenagers turn out to be less than 40km from their homes. Just over ninety-nine percent are back home within three days. I know the maths is on their side, I did the numbers myself, but what if Tanya’s story lives in the minorities?

  At least an inspector named Jarwar has also been asked to give it the once over. And let’s hope she shares our curiosity, because to me there were a hundred unfinished sentences in the bedroom alone.

  *

  We head out into the night on foot to collect CCTV footage from the supermarket. They have a confirmed sighting of a convicted shoplifter returning to his old stomping ground. We’ll bring the footage back at the end of the shift and by tomorrow morning he’ll be back in a cell. Need for stimulation, impulsivity, poor behaviour controls, shoplifters always get me down. Now I remember why…

  A spark goes off in my mind that ignites a memory of a story told about that girl I once kissed. A gossipy girl went over to her house and my kissing girl showed her a collection she had in her room. A cupboard full of carefully arranged items: bubble gum balls, fizzy drink cans, eggs with toys inside, all of them unopened. She had stolen one item a week from the off-license for the past year. Soon the girls started to wrestle, lively girls they were, and only twelve. Then the door flung open. My kissing girl was taken off into another room. The other girl heard her being thumped, but no tears. Then dad, or whoever he was, drove the other girl home in silence.

  We walk the beat saying nothing, as the local characters pass.

  A woman with short dark hair waves from over the road.

  A guy in a tracksuit nods discreetly as he passes on a bike.

  I smile excessively at them all, safe in the knowledge that I surely know them, despite their faces meaning precisely nothing to me. I construct an indiscriminately friendly edifice, brick by brick.

  ‘I think there’s a man in the house,’ I say.

  ‘What house?’ Emre says.

  ‘The Fraser house.’

  ‘What? Because of your aftershave theory?’

  ‘Yes, because of my aftershave theory.’

  ‘Why would she be hiding them?’

  ‘I don’t know. A) Ms Fraser has a perfectly innocent boyfriend but doesn’t want the finger pointed at him. B) She has a not so sweet one she fears could have done something with her daughter, or C) She has one who her daughter simply wanted to get away from.’

  ‘Going along with this… for a moment. If there is some guy of hers she’s protecting, he could live somewhere else. How do you know he’s in the house?’

  ‘Because I can smell him.’

  Emre Bartu stops in the street. Puts his top teeth against his bottom lip. His habit.

  ‘Of course you can smell him. Obviously you can smell him. Dunno why I asked. You can smell scentless gases so obviously you can smell a man hiding in a house. Obviously.’

  ‘I’ll bet you a tenner he’s in there.’

  Bartu looks around, wondering whether he’s indulged me too much.

  ‘We’re not going back there.’

  ‘Not for a tenner? Or are you afraid of losing? Tenner?’

  Amit waves from over the road. He was two years below me at school. I know it’s Amit as he has a particular way of waving, as if he thinks it’s necessary to make himself taller and lean towards you slightly for you to see him. He works most of the hours whoever sends in a corner shop, which is excellently named ‘The Corner Shop’. He seems to be beckoning us over. Emre Bartu uses the opportunity to cross the road and escape our conversation.

  I see a girl with blonde hair. Not a green dress, but similar enough to the girl in my dream from behind. Emre starts to come with me as I follow her, but soon gives up. His voice fades away behind me as I hurry after her.

  ‘Tom? Tom!’ he says, his timbre disappearing into cold wind.

  I can tell by her walk that it’s her. Yet I’ve never seen her face in my dream, a dream I’ve had many times since the bullet. Not that I’m even sure I can see faces in dreams. She knows I’m a few feet away, I think, as I fight my way through a litany of smokers braving the chill who’ve spilled out onto the street from the pub. She weaves in and out of them. If I shouted I could make her stop but I don’t know what I’d say if I caught her. If we want to make an arrest, we have to call in the ‘real police’. If they run, you can hold onto them, that’s about the extent of our powers. Many PCSOs have got black eyes and fractured cheekbones that way. Anyway, I don’t want to arrest her, I just want to see her.

  ‘Stop!’

  She speeds up as she hears this and ducks down an alley.

  I’m running, a kind of run anyway, my left foot dragging behind me. I’m causing a scene. I slip slightly. It’s icy underfoot, the snow has turned to slush. I want to shout ‘Stop that woman!’ but that would be too much. I could claim mistaken identity as soon as I saw her, and still get my good look and make my assumptions. I follow her down the alley. It’s dark. I see her silhouette emerge from the other side. I’m panting hard.

  ‘Lady with the blonde hair. Stop!’ I shout as I get to the other end of the passage, but all I see is my breath in the clearing, nothing else around but a few trees and some residential streets. She could live in any of those houses, or none at all.

  I feel suddenly unsafe. I turn and head back through the alley, almost holding my breath, a fear gripping me hard. Paranoia means ‘baseless and excessive suspicions’. However, what I have is different. I’m dressed as a target and I’ve already caught a bulls-eye in the head once. Somehow I’ve never felt vulnerable until this moment, but now I do and I don’t think it’s baseless. Paranoia comes from the Greek so really should be pronounced paraneea. Maybe I’ll claim that as my own. I’m rightfully afraid: I have paraneea.

  I see something come out at me.

  ‘Argh!’ I let out a yell, the biting air filling my lungs afterwards, my body hurting like I’ve just hit the line after an ultra-marathon.

  A couple pass me on the other side laughing quietly to themselves. A man in uniform, filled with dread and shouting all on his own. I get it, it’s funny, I suppose. My hands go to my knees and I work hard to regain my cool and catch my breath. I guess I don’t look like the ideal person to be looking after the streets. But looks can be deceiving.

  Back at The Corner Shop, Amit and Emre are deep in conversation about nothing in particular.

  ‘Hey, where d’you go? Try not to walk off like that, okay?’

  ‘Thought I saw someone I knew,’ I say, mostly composed.

  He gives me a look that suggests, understandably, that he finds that pretty hard to believe.

  I hear barking, perhaps in the flat above or next door.

  ‘Hey, Amit, you got a dog?’ I say.

  ‘Nah man. It’s been barking on an’ off all day. Someone left it in a car. Cruel, if you arks me.’

  ‘Which one?’ says Emre as we step outside.

  ‘Over
der I reckon,’ says Amit, pointing to a rusty Metro on the corner. Emre and I are drawn to it. We approach, Bartu with his torch-app on this time and his lighter firmly in his pocket.

  Bark. Bark. Bark.

  The first thing we notice is that there’ll be no need for my baton. The dashboard is partially lit up in there. So I’d guess the key is inside and we could open the door if we wished to.

  Bark. Bark. Bark.

  ‘Looks like they didn’t think they’d be gone long,’ he says, running the possibilities through his mind.

  Bark. Bark. Bark.

  I press my hand onto the chilled car window, then push my head against it, peering in to see through the steamed up glass.

  ‘Shit!’ I say, leaping back as the dog jumps up. Emre comes around, wipes the window and sniggers. A Chihuahua puppy sits there. Its tongue lolls out and its dark wet eyes stare up at us desperately.

  Bark. Bark. Bark.

  ‘What d’you think of this?’ Emre says, his torch skimming over the windshield. I take a look. A kind of jagged heart-shape symbol and three exclamation marks drawn on it in lipstick from the inside. I make a mental note of it to save for later.

  ‘I dunno,’ I say, my eyes wandering to his.

  He knows that at this point I’d rather open the door and take a look inside, but as there are people around and Emre respects a bit of restraint, I choose to stay circumspect.

  ‘Registration check?’ I say.

  He calls it in as we head back into the warmth of the shop. I don’t want to have to take the dog to the pound. It’ll break my heart. Mostly I’m made of stone now, whereas before the bullet I’d cry at mid-afternoon soap operas, but when emotion creeps up on me it does so with ferocity. Someone else will have to take the thing; I’ll crumble and break before I get there.

  I wonder about the lipstick marks. I consider the heart-shape.

  ‘This is Emre Bartu, over.’

  ‘Mona speaking, over.’

  ‘Hi Mona, can we get a registration check? Over.’

  ‘Yes, go ahead. Over.’

  He does so as Amit and I shoot the breeze behind him.

  ‘Got it. Okay, Emre? That’s registered to 42 Park Drive. Oh wow. Okay. That’s…’

  ‘Mona. You there? Go ahead. Over.’

  ‘That’s registered to a… a missing person. A girl.’

  I hear it and take a step closer.

  ‘Mona. Are you saying that’s registered to Tanya Fraser?… Over. She’s only sixteen… over.’

  ‘No. Err… No, it’s a seventeen-year-old girl called Jade Bridges. She was reported missing earlier today. Over.’

  Bark. Bark. Bark.

  We stare into space. The noise of Amit clearing up the place is the only sound.

  ‘Okay, thank you, Mona. We’re heading back. Over.’

  Two missing girls. Two abandoned cars. One explosion. One dog. And a lipstick heart on a windscreen.

  From nowhere, a man in a black hoodie charges into the store.

  Amit shouts, Emre is a few steps away and can’t get to the guy, he’s over six foot and his intentions are clear. He comes for me, pulling a six-inch blade out from his pocket. Without thinking, not consciously, I reach for Amit’s coat, which was resting on the door handle next to me. I grab it as the man ghosts in and by the time he is thrusting his weapon towards my chest I manage to step to the side and force him to stab into the coat, which allows me to wrap the thing around his arm up to the elbow and pacify the weapon.

  I see it in small moments.

  Like a graph.

  It seems so obvious.

  I needed something to protect myself and that was all there was around. I thought he’d be faster than me, which he should’ve been, but I saw it coming. My paraneea was calling me. I grab his hand through the coat and turn the knife away from me. I do all this with my right hand as it just seems to make sense logistically. Then with my left hand I grab the back of his head and drive it into the glass of the door. Not excessively, but enough to let him know I’m there. His head shatters it, and he bleeds instantly through his balaclava.

  He loses his grip on the knife altogether as this happens and Emre is there to grab it when it hits the floor.

  ‘Hold him! Hold him! I’ll call it in,’ I say, getting my radio out.

  We’re not allowed cuffs. I consider beating him unconscious with my baton but I doubt that would go down well. We certainly don’t have a Taser. Or a gun. We just have our hands.

  ‘This is Mondrian requesting police support, over.’

  But as I look around, he pulls far enough away from Emre to be able to gain some room to elbow him brutally in the sternum, and dash away as Emre hits the ground. He breathes hard and so do I, my hand to my head. Almost exactly where the bullet hit.

  I want to give chase but instead I slowly sink to the ground. For a moment I think I’m going to faint but manage not to. This first few days back have provided me with more stimulation than I’ve had in the entirety of the rest of my life. I’ve certainly hit the ground running, and I set the pace, but now I’m struggling to keep up.

  We both sit with our arses against the freezing floor, our lungs working overtime. Amit rushes around, giving us a bottle of water each. I saw the man’s face, briefly, his balaclava riding up in his struggle with Bartu. But then faces mean nothing to me. They’re just bags of skin stretched over bone.

  Emre composes his respiratory system, rises and kicks the door with frustration. I can’t seem to catch my breath at all, it seems to dart around and keep slipping through my fingers.

  I’ve been targeted. Do we add this to the lipstick, the dog, the cars, the missing girls and the explosion? Or is this something else? I turn it over in my mind. I breathe deep. We all do. A symphony of breath.

  ‘Amit. I’m sorry about your door,’ I say, as I push my spine against the wood panel behind me and let my head fall back to meet it. Struggling against the onrushing thoughts and events that arrest me. Swooning as the world drifts in and out of focus.

  Bark. Bark. Bark.

  11

  ‘Are you okay?

  Doing it your own way.

  You’ve got to listen to the sounds,

  And turn your life around.’

  Can’t move.

  If I do it’ll blur the image and we don’t want that, but I’m not good at lying still, it makes me uneasy. I’m gripped by the same thought I had the last time I was in here. I’ve heard that MRIs have been known to drag and shoot large pieces of equipment around the room, such is the force of the magnetism it creates. It happens. People have died from the blows caused by such projectiles so I’m not being dramatic. Look it up.

  Thankfully, I can’t have an MRI, as the bullet fragments in my head could heat up and cook my brain from the inside or even tear their way out of my skull and fly into the machine. The CT is supposed to be the softer option but I still feel horribly hemmed in as the ‘O’ runs its rule all over me.

  I’ve always been claustrophobic, haunted by buried alive dreams, and having stillness enforced on me triggers the dose. The only way I can stop thinking about how stuck I am is by drifting away, listening to the music in my headphones, from an iPod Ryans handed me before stepping out of the room and leaving me stranded here. He’s created a playlist called ‘Soothe and Distract’, and I try my best to let it do that to me.

  ‘It’s a shame, in the rain, here it comes again… .’

  I try to ignore the whirrs. The clicks. And the nurse’s words that ‘It’s just like being pushed through a large doughnut, people don’t tend to feel claustrophobic at all, so don’t worry’, which only served to make me feel even worse; I was already feeling the tingle as she proceeded to stick me with the needle and push the contrast medium through my body, a liquid that heightens the definition of the scan, that I imagine as a tiny purple poison worming its way through the minuscule canals of my arteries.

  The final insult as my chest tightens is that when Ryans’ voice says ‘we
’re going for one’, I have to hold my breath for a full twenty seconds. Which I do as I close my eyes, and it moves.

  Breath locked in, I consider the change that has come over me. Not just because of the attack with the six-inch blade, although that will certainly do it. I felt it before that. Like my body was telling me something was coming, had sensed it like the vibration along train lines. From the atmosphere to my bones. I try to control my moods through diet, mental stimulation and as much exercise as I can muster. But the darkness comes over me from time to time.

  My breath shoots out as the conveyer belt stops and I chance a look up, and Ryans signals that he needs ‘one more’. I take another deep draw, keeping my eyes open this time as it moves, and I try not to quake so we can get it over with.

  The music plays.

  ‘The sound of the river as it floats on by. And by and by…’

  I stare down at my hand in this soft rock coffin. It quivers when I tell it to sleep. My face twitches and a thought takes hold. All the things I saw don’t mean a thing.

  The picture.

  The dog.

  The blacked out car.

  The girl.

  The lipstick on the window.

  I listened to a book last night by an economic theorist. The amazing thing about humans, he says, is that we look at clouds and see faces. Everything a pattern, every mess a picture. Dot to dot to dot. But what we don’t think is that sometimes the pattern goes: 3, 6, harpoon, hash tag. You’re probably trying to work that one out now but don’t bother. It’s just the world throwing things around in a whirlwind. Shit doing what it does: happening. Like my brain in between coherent dreams whacking things together and seeing what comes loose. It signifies nothing. There is no meaning. It’s all just random things.

  I see them circled around my head and coloured. I can almost touch them. But I will never connect them. We are not connected. Us. People. We are separate and always will be, distant and misunderstood. They are scattered images that signify nothing. And I, in the middle of them, am alone and trapped and always will be. Forever.

  Held at arm’s length. From any truth. From any warmth. Trapped in this body. Trapped in this head. In this cell.